Book Review: Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, by Shatema Threadcraft

Date01 October 2018
AuthorAnnie Menzel
DOI10.1177/0090591717741898
Published date01 October 2018
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews 805
Mills says that the unequal conditions of a racially unjust society require cor-
rective justice targeted at unfair white advantage.
Corrective justice would retain the valuable core of Rawls’s work, his
resurrection of “social contract theory in the form of a thought-experiment”
where people were blocked from self-knowledge, but by a thinner veil. Mills
writes, “We know that we are going to emerge into a society whose basic
structure has historically been shaped by white supremacy. All the social
variants among which we choose will have a white-supremacist state as their
ancestor (since and ideal society is not an option for us)” (213). With this
revision to the thought-experiment, Mills argues that political philosophy
would be poised to “correct to a greater or lesser degree for this history of
racial domination, thereby generating different possible social orders” (213).
From the standpoint of the case Mills makes against Rawlsian liberalism, I
find Mills’s revised thought-experiment geared at deriving corrective, not
distributive, justice compelling.
Yet, I am not convinced that Mills’s version of the Rawlsian thought-
experiment can address the endemic problem of white supremacy Mills
describes throughout the book—that racial liberalism is an ideology that
impacts the rational capacities of those who are unable to get critical distance
from it. Even if Mills’s thought-experiment derives adequate principles of
corrective justice, it is not clear that these principles will be acknowledged as
legitimate ones to guide the shape of racial relations or distribute material
resources. Though I think Mills is right to construe the project of racial jus-
tice, at least in part, as an epistemological problem, I am not persuaded that
liberalism has failed to fulfill its promise solely because of ideological rea-
sons like the inability to perceive the objective truth or one’s “true” interest.
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, by Shatema Threadcraft.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Reviewed by: Annie Menzel, University of Wisconsin–Madison
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717741898
One of the marks of a genuine breakthrough in political theory is that it seems
impossible, in retrospect, to have tried to understand political life without it.
Shatema Threadcraft’s notion of intimate justice effects such a conceptual
shift. Centering the historical and ongoing violation and exploitation of black

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT